32 The New York Reviewabout it once he’d finished, consumed
by “fresh tasks”:I thought that only
Someone who lived in turning to
fresh tasks
Could so forget his handiwork on
which
He spent himself, the labor of his
ax....This is of course a sanitized moral sce-
nario. The woodpile feels nothing at all
when it is forgotten. Its abandonment
by the woodchopper, in fact, allows this
little man-made artifact to rejoin na-
ture, where it might “warm the frozen
swamp as best it could/With the slow
smokeless burning of decay.” Frost’s
metaphors for poetry- writing often
stage it this way, as a morally neutral
and self- expending process: poems are
“bits of order” fringed by chaos, or “a
momentary stay against confusion,”
or “cigarette smoke rings” dispersing
even as they form. They exhaust their
author’s ingenuity; then they end.But the “bits of order” Frost con-
structed in his life were not so easily put
aside. The world of obligation seems
to be gaining on him from the opening
pages of this volume. Around March 14,
1929, Frost wrote to a young protégé,
the woodsman- poet Wade Van Dore,
“I wonder what you would say to tak-
ing charge of my farm for a year.” Then,
Frost provided this baffling prospectus:The work could be as much or as
little as you cared to make it. There
would be tree- planting and tree-
moving. There would be tearing
down some of the old buildings we
want to get rid of. There would be
some trench digging and stream
damming. There would be some
repairing and doing over of the old
house (a real antique but in only
a so- so state of preservation) and
there would be some improving
of the road in to attend to. There
would be or could be; as I say
you could decide for yourself how
much of anything you cared to give
time to.Frost seems less interested in the main-
tenance of the farm than in performing
for a fan—mixing tones, playing with
the senses of “would be” and “could
be,” and taking characteristic pleasure
in the piled- up gerunds. And he’s put
his hired man in some Frostian predica-
ments: how to cultivate the conditional
as a permanent state of mind; how to
put down stakes in the participial flux
of nature; how to make choices within
an environment that does not yield to
human agency. Frost’s last ambiguous
mandate, the most important of all,
picks up the syntax of those prior non-
or un- assignments: “You could take all
the time you pleased for your writing.”
But writing solves only the problems
of writing; it can’t keep the road cleared
or the furnace lit. Van Dore’s stay at the
farm seemed predestined to fail—or, to
put it another way, to succeed in fail-
ing, and therefore to bear out some of
Frost’s favorite, darkly scenic hypothe-
ses. “My farm is fast going back to wil-
derness—as fast as can be expected,” he
told Untermeyer in August 1929. Frost’s
poems often study human responses to
the encroaching wilderness, but in the
“wilderness” of Frost’s farm Van Doresoon confronted a variety of human
trouble. Carol, a brooding, unsettling
presence, might “be with you a little,”
the poet wrote to Van Dore: “I hope
you will like him for all his reserve and
timidity. You won’t find him bookish,
but you will find him fond of the land.”
Frost had also invited (apparently
without informing Van Dore) an im-
poverished friend, the illustrator J. J.
Lankes, to camp out with his wife and
four children on his land, while Van
Dore enjoyed the relative comforts of
a roof over his head. “Lankes is over
at the Gully camping out,” Frost wrote
to Untermeyer, pitting the two men
against each other. “But I am afraid
we are not giving him just the company
he wants in Wade Van Dore.” Lankes
“has a family of four to work for and
Wade’s emancipation rouses his wrath
and jealousy.” Wade, for his part, had
already proven to be “a strange boy.
His mother tells us that his obediently
doi ng what he is a sked to do th rows h i m
into long cataleptic sleeps afterward.”
At times, Frost appears to be enter-
tained by the rivalries he has put into
motion back on his farm, but the word
“wrath” suggests the specter of vio-
lence, madness, and fear to be found
throughout these letters, elements
natural to the hardscrabble pastoral
Frost explores in his work—in poems
like “A Servant to Servants” (for me,
maybe the most frightening poem in
English) and the ferocious anti- Eden
of “The Subverted Flower.” In Sep-
tember 1929 Frost abruptly changed
his tone with Van Dore: “You speak of
the hope of so conducting your future
life as to please me. You can please me
only by pleasing yourself. I have little
use for any who haven’t seen a way of
their own to live.” Slapped back a little,
Van Dore is then invited back in, but
with a condition: “In here and there a
detail you might show your friendship
for me by deferring to my wishes — as in
the matter of Walter Hendricks.” Hen-
dricks, a founder of Marlboro College
in Vermont, would later reenter Frost’s
graces, but in 1929 Frost considered
him to be a kind of stalker:You can’t tell him not to come now
that you have invited him. I don’t
want him affronted or hurt. I dont
want a case or an issue made of
his visit. But please for my sake
say nothing to Carol of his visit
and don’t take him near the other
houses.The “other houses” included one
where Frost’s daughter Irma lived with
her son and husband. A note in this
edition explains the root of the conflict:
Irma had confided to her father that
Hendricks, who was Frost’s student at
Amherst, had made sexual advances
upon her while she was a teenager in his
care. According to the note, Irma “suf-
fered from paranoid fantasies, often of
sexual predation, and RF concluded that
Hendricks had been wrongly accused.”
It is impossible to know what happened;
certainly there was never another in-
kling of such behavior from Hendricks.
But in 1929 Frost still very much feared
the young man’s “persistence in keeping
on my trail,” and warned Van Dore to
stay away from him: “You surely cant
mean to make me real trouble.”If the Gully was a site for the rivalries
among Frost’s protégés to play out, itA NEW STORY COLLECTIONA NEW STORY COLLECTION
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